The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Blindly she entered a woman’s clothing store. She was a surprise to the salesclerks, exiting at the rear. She doubled back to the hotel, she’d eluded the man in the navy jacket. She thought no more of him. Except that evening entering the tap room of the hotel to meet Tignor, she saw the man who’d followed her with Tignor, at the bar. They were talking, laughing. The man wasn’t wearing the navy jacket but Rebecca was sure it was him.

  A test! Tignor was testing me.

  Rebecca would never know. When she joined Tignor, Tignor was alone at the bar. The other man had slipped away. Tignor was in one of his warm, expansive moods, he must have had a good day.

  “How’s my girl? Did you miss your old husband?”

  This time, it was a fact. Not speculation.

  Waking one morning and her breasts were heavy-feeling, and abnormally sensitive. Her belly felt bloated. There was a tingling through her body like a mild electric current. In bed in Tignor’s arms she dared to wake him, to whisper to him her apprehension. For suddenly, Rebecca was frightened. She felt as if she’d been pushed to the edge of something like a parapet, she was risking too much. Tignor’s response was surprising to her. She had expected him to react with a grunt of disapproval, but he did not. He was waking fully, he was thinking. She could feel his brain churning with thought. And then he said nothing, he only just kissed her, a hard wet aggressive kiss. He kneaded her breasts, he sucked at the nipples that were so sensitive, Rebecca winced. He whispered, “How’s that feel? You want more?”

  Rebecca held the man tight, tight for dear life.

  Dear Katy, and dear LaVerne lying on a hotel bed writing on hotel stationery, one of Tignor’s almost-emptied glasses of bourbon on the bedside table from the previous night. I have such exciting news, I AM PREGNANT. Tignor took me to a doctor in Port Oriskany. The baby is due in December he says. I AM SO EXCITED.

  Rebecca reread what she’d written to her friends who were faraway and becoming increasingly vague to her, and added Tignor wants the baby, too, he says if it will make me happy that is what he wants, too. And again reread the letter, and ripped it up in disgust.

  It was so, as Jacob Schwart had said. Words are lies.

  Now she was pregnant, and so cozy-feeling. Even what’s called morning sickness came to be familiar, reassuring. The doctor had been so nice. He’d told her what to expect, stage by stage. His nurse had given her a pamphlet. Not for a moment had they appeared to doubt that she was Niles Tignor’s wife, in fact they were both acquainted with Tignor and pleased to see him. Rebecca lay cuddled against Tignor in bed saying, “We will need a place to stay, Tignor. For the baby. Won’t we, Tignor?” and Tignor said, in his sleepy-affable voice, “Sure, honey,” and Rebecca said, “Because just stopping in hotels like we do…That would be hard, with a tiny baby.”

  It was a pregnancy-sign, that Rebecca would say tiny baby. She was beginning to speak, and to think, in baby-talk. Tiny! She jammed her fist against her mouth to keep from laughing. A tiny baby would be the size of a mouse.

  In these drowsy-loving talks with Tignor she did not say home. She knew how Tignor would screw up his face at home.

  And yet, Tignor was not to be predicted. He surprised Rebecca by saying he’d been thinking of renting a furnished apartment for her anyway. In Chautauqua Falls, out along the canal in the country where it was quiet, he knew of a place. “You and the baby would live there. Daddy would be there when he could.” So tenderly Tignor spoke, Rebecca could have no reason to think this was the end of anything.

  Lying on a hotel bed writing a letter on hotel stationery, a glass of bourbon on the bedside table. So delicious, by lamplight! She wasn’t so lonely with Tignor away, now she had the baby snug inside her. This letter she would work damn hard at, she would make a first draft and copy it over.

  April 19, 1955

  Dear Miss Lutter,

  I am sending you this little Easter gift, I thought of you when I saw it in a store here in Schenectady. I hope you can wear it on your Easter coat or dress. “Mother-of-pearl” is so beautiful, I think.

  I guess I never told you, I am married and moved away from Milburn. My husband and I will have a residance in Chautauqua Falls. My husband is Niles Tignor, he is a businessman with the Black Horse Brewery you have heard of. He is often traveling on business. He is a handsome “older man.”

  We will have our first baby in December!

  I will be 18 in three weeks. I am quite “grown up” now! I was very ignorant when I came to live with you and could not appreciate your goodness kindness.

  At 18 I would no longer be a ward of the county, if I was not married. So it will be all legal that

  Miss Lutter there is something for me to tell you I don’t know how to find the words

  I am so ashamed of

  I am so sorry for

  I hope that you will remember me in your prayers. I wish

  “Bullshit.”

  It had taken Rebecca almost an hour to stammer out these halting lines. And when she reread them she was overcome with disgust. How stupid she sounded! How childish. She’d had to look up the simplest words in the dictionary yet she’d managed to misspell residence anyway. She tore the letter into pieces.

  Later, she sent Miss Lutter the mother-of-pearl brooch with just an Easter card. Your friend Rebecca.

  The brooch was in the shape of a small white camellia that seemed to Rebecca very beautiful. It had cost twenty dollars.

  “Twenty dollars! If Ma could know.”

  She included no return address on the little package. So that Miss Lutter could not write back to thank her. And so that Rebecca could never know if her former teacher would have written to thank her.

  “Mrs. Tignor. Good to meet you.”

  They were burly good-natured men like Tignor whom you would not wish to cross. In taverns and hotel tap rooms they drank with Tignor and they looked and behaved like Tignor’s other drinking companions but they were police officers: not the kind to wear uniforms, as Tignor explained. (Rebecca hadn’t known there were police officers who didn’t wear uniforms. They had higher ranks: detective, lieutenant.)

  These men mingled easily with the others. They were hearty eaters and drinkers. They picked their teeth thoughtfully with wooden toothpicks placed in whiskey shot glasses on bars beside pickled pigs’ feet and fried onion rings. They favored cigars over cigarettes. They favored Black Horse ale which was on the house wherever Niles Tignor drank. They were respectful of Rebecca whom they never failed to call “Mrs. Tignor”�with sometimes a hint of a wink over her head, to Tignor.

  They’ve met other women of his. But never a wife.

  She smiled to think this. She was so young, damned good-looking she knew they were saying, nudging one another. In envy of Niles Tignor who was their friend.

  If they carried guns inside their bulky clothes, Rebecca never saw the guns. If Tignor sometimes carried his gun, Rebecca never saw it.

  38

  She was Niles Tignor’s wife, and she was having Niles Tignor’s baby. These were days, weeks, months of surpassing happiness. And yet, like any young wife, Rebecca made a mistake.

  She knew: Tignor did not like her behaving in any over-friendly way with men. He had made it clear to her. He had warned her, more than once. Now she was pregnant, her skin glowed darkish-pale as if lit from within by a candle flame. There was often a flush in her cheeks, often she was breathless, moist-eyed. Her breasts and hips were more ample, womanly. Tignor teased her, she was eating more than he was. Almost hourly, the baby in her womb seemed to be growing.

  Of course Rebecca knew (from the illustrated pamphlet Your Body, Your Baby & You), that in fact the “fetus” more resembled a frog than a human being, yet by the twelfth week, in May, she fantasized that Baby Niles had already acquired a face, and a soul.

  “There are men crazy for pregnant women. A woman blown up like a goddam whale, still there’s men who…” Tignor’s voice, bemused and disdainful, trailed off. You could see that he, Tig
nor, was not inclined to such perversity.

  And so Rebecca knew, to shun the attentions of men. Even elderly men. She was aloof and indifferent to the most innocuous of greetings�“Good morning!”�“Fine morning isn’t it?”�cast in her direction by men in hotel corridors, elevators, restaurants. Yet she had a weakness for women. Now in her pregnancy, she was avid for the company of women. Tignor was annoyed by her gabbing with waitresses, salesclerks, chambermaids for more than a minute or two. He liked his exotically good-looking young wife to be admired, to be vivacious, and to display “personality”: but he did not like too much of this, behind his back. In the hotels in which Niles Tignor was known as a frequent guest he knew he was talked-of by the staff, he knew and accepted this but he did not want Rebecca to tell tales of him, that might become exaggerated in the re-telling, and make him into a figure of fun. And now that his wife was pregnant, and would soon begin to show her pregnancy, he was particularly sensitive.

  It was in May 1955, that Tignor returned unexpectedly to their room in the Hotel Henry Hudson in Troy, to discover Rebecca not only gabbing with the chambermaid who was making up the room, but helping the woman change the bed. In the corridor just outside the door Tignor froze, observing.

  For there was his wife deftly tucking in bedsheets, tugging at a sheet as the other woman tugged at the other end. With girlish eagerness Rebecca was saying, “…this baby, he’s always hungry! He takes after his daddy for sure. His daddy wants him bad as I do. I was so surprised! I thought my heart would burst, I was…well, I was so surprised. You don’t expect men to have those kinds of feelings, do you? My birthday was last week, I’m nineteen and that’s plenty old enough to have a baby, my doctor says. I guess I’m a little scared. But I’m very healthy. My husband is always traveling, we stay in the best hotels like this one. He has an important position with the Black Horse Brewery, maybe you know. You know him, I guess?�Niles Tignor?”

  When Rebecca glanced around, to see why the maid was staring so fixedly past her shoulder, she saw Tignor in the doorway.

  Quietly Tignor told the maid, “Out. I need to speak with my wife.”

  She would not try to elude him. Vividly she recalled her father needing to discipline her. Not once but many times. And Tignor had been sparing with her, until now. Pa’s way had not been to slap but to grab her by the upper arm and shake-shake-shake until her teeth rattled. You are one of them. One of them! Rebecca no longer knew if she had ever known what Pa had meant by these words and what she had done to provoke him but she knew she’d deserved it, her punishment. You always know.

  The bleeding began a half-hour later. Cramps in the pit of her belly, and a sudden hot surging of blood. Tignor had not struck her there, Tignor was not to blame. Niles Tignor was not a man to strike a woman with his fists, and not a pregnant woman in the belly. Yet the bleeding began, a miscarriage it would be called. Tignor poured bourbon into glasses for them both.

  “The next one, you can keep.”

  39

  It was so. He kept his promise. She had not doubted him.

  “You’ll be safe here. It’s quiet here. Not like in town. Not like on the road, that ain’t good for a woman trying to have a baby. See, there’s a food store here. Five-minute walk. Anytime you want, if I’m not here you can walk to town, along the canal. You like to walk, eh? Most walking-girl I ever known! Or you could get a ride, there’s plenty of neighbors here. Meltzer’s wife, she’ll take you when she goes in. I’ll pay for a telephone, and for sure I’ll call you when I’m on the road. I’ll make sure you have everything you need. This time, you got to take better care of yourself. Maybe cut back on the drinking. That’s my fault, I kind of encouraged you, I guess. That’s my weakness, too. And I’ll be here as much as I can. I’m getting tired of the road, frankly. I’m looking into some property in town, maybe buying into a tavern. Well!”

  Kissing her, baring his big horsey teeth in a grin.

  “Y’know I’m crazy about you, girl, eh?”

  She knew. She was four weeks’ pregnant again, and this time she would have the baby.

  “Why’s it called ‘Poor Farm Road’?”

  She was frightened, naturally she asked jokey questions.

  Yet Tignor surprised her, he knew the answer: a long time ago, could have been a hundred years ago, there’d been an actual “poor farm”�“a farm for poor people”�about a mile down the road where the schoolhouse was, now. Vaguely Tignor thought it might’ve had something to do with the canal being dug.

  Edna Meltzer said it was so, there had been an actual poor farm just up the road: “I remember it real well from when I was little. Mostly old people. That got sick or too old and couldn’t work their farms, and had to sell them cheap. There wasn’t this ‘welfare’ we have now to take care of people�there wasn’t ‘income tax’�‘Social Security’�any kind of thing like that.” Mrs. Meltzer made a snorting sound that might have meant she was disgusted that life had ever been so cruel, or might have meant she was disgusted how people were coddled now in modern times. She was a stout pudding-faced woman with sharp little eyes and a motherly air that seemed to suck oxygen out of the room.

  The Meltzers, who lived approximately a quarter-mile away, were Rebecca’s nearest neighbors on the Poor Farm Road. Mr. Meltzer owned Meltzer’s Gas & Auto Repair with a big round red-letter ESSO sign out front of his garage. There was some kind of connection between Meltzer and Niles Tignor, Rebecca hadn’t figured out. The men were known to each other yet not exactly friends.

  Tignor warned, “Take care you don’t go gabbing with the old woman, eh? An old bag like that, her kids’re grown up, she’ll be wanting to ask you all kinds of things ain’t her business, see? But you know better, I guess.” Tignor stroked Rebecca’s head, her hair. Since the miscarriage, he’d been gentle with her, and patient. But Rebecca knew not to talk carelessly with anyone. Whether Tignor was around, or whether Tignor was away.

  It was a ramshackle old farmhouse at the end of a dirt lane�not where you’d expect Niles Tignor to live! Rebecca had expected a rented house or an apartment in one of Tignor’s favored cities, at least a residence in Chautauqua Falls instead of in the deep countryside. Tignor kept saying, “Nice, ain’t it? Real private.” No other house was visible from the upstairs windows of this house. Nor could you see the road, that was a narrow gravel road. Except for the slow-rising smoke-haze to the east, you could not have guessed in which direction Chautauqua Falls was. All that remained of the farm’s original ninety acres were a few overgrown fields and pastures, a faded-red falling-down hay barn and several outbuildings, and a thirty-foot-deep stone well that yielded water so cold it made your mouth ache, and tasted faintly of metal.

  “It’s beautiful, Tignor. It will be special to us.”

  From the driveway, the farmhouse looked impressive, bordered by fierce craggy yew trees, but up close it was clearly shabby, in need of repair. Yet when Tignor was home, though he did not call it home, he appeared to be in a heightened mood.

  He ate the meals Rebecca nervously prepared for him, from cookbook recipes. Tignor was easy to please: meat, meat, meat! And always potatoes: mashed, oven-roasted, boiled. In his spending moods he took her to Chautauqua Falls to buy supplies. “It’s our honeymoon, kid. A little delayed.” The old house was partly furnished but a new gas stove was badly needed, a refrigerator to replace the smelly old icebox, a new mattress for their bed, curtains and carpets. And baby things: bassinet, stroller, baby-bath. “One of those rubber-things where you pour the water in, you heat the water and pour it in, and there’s a little hose, like, and it drains out the bottom. And it’s on wheels.”

  Rebecca laughed and nudged Tignor’s ribs. “You’ve been a daddy before, haven’t you? How many times?” She spoke so playfully, not at all accusingly, Tignor could hardly take offense.

  Ruefully Tignor said, “Honey, it’s always for the first time. Everything that matters is.”

  This remark so struck Rebecca, she wanted to cry
. It was love’s perfect answer.

  He won’t leave me, then. He will stay.

  For some time Tignor behaved as if the run-down farmhouse was home to him, maybe it was true as he’d said he had grown tired of traveling. Maybe he’d grown tired of cutthroat competition. Though even when Tignor was officially home he was often away on what he called day trips. Driving out in the morning, returning after dark. Rebecca came to wonder if her husband was still an agent for the Black Horse Brewery? He was a man of secrets, like one of those fires that smolder underground for weeks, months, years. She wanted to think that one day he would surprise her with a house he’d bought for them, their own house in town. Tignor was a big battered-face moon in the night sky, you saw only the brightly lighted part, glaring like a coin, but you knew that there was another, dark and secret side. The two sides of the pockmarked moon were simultaneous yet you wanted to think, like a child, that there was only the light.

  He means to leave me.

  No: he loves me. He has promised.

  Since Rebecca’s miscarriage, and the fever she’d had for days afterward, the feeling between her and Tignor had changed, subtly. Tignor was not so jovial any longer, so loud-laughing. Not so likely to shove her, shake her. Rarely did he touch her except when they were in bed. She saw him regarding her with narrowed eyes. As if she was a riddle to him, and he didn’t like riddles. He was repentant, and yet still he was angry. For Tignor was not a man to forget anger.